I have extremely strong political views that don’t really belong with a blog about fighting cancer, so I’ve kept them to myself. However, one thing on the political front has been going on in the last month or so that is very apropos to this blog, so I’m making a comment. A footnote, if you will, in the shouting match between those in favor and those against Obamacare.

Yesterday, while I was doing Pilates, I realized something. I’ve spent the last fifteen months curled up. My body has literally taken on the fetal position as my go-to state of physical being. It probably started with how much I slept during chemo and then got worse when I consciously curled in to protect my chest after surgery.

As a result, my shoulders are hunched, my hip flexors and quads are tight as violin strings, and my calves require encouragement for me to walk in the morning.

Something interesting happened when I met with Northwestern’s onco-fertility lovely woman in August. I mentioned my blog, and she got all excited.

“Oh! I tripped across your blog post about your experience with fertility on LiveStrong, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to respond! I’m SO SORRY that you had such a chaotic experience. I’ll make sure that you never see any of those people again if you have to go through this again. I was really worried that I would never hear from you again, and I couldn’t figure out if any of the people were me until I reread your file and figured out that they weren’t but no one should have to go through that experience.”

Gulp. “Oh, boy. I didn’t mean to step all over you — you personally have been absolutely amazing. It was just upsetting that not a lot of the fertility people understood the multiple layers of emotion going on with fertility and cancer and chemo and…”

She nodded. “I get it. But I wanted to let you know that we’ve made some changes as a result.”